NI founders Truchard and Kodosky: The human ties that bind

[EE Times is celebrating its 40th anniversary, with special articles to honor the innovators who made the electronics industry what it is today, as well as the visionaries who are taking it forward. Look for more stories on the 40th anniversary in our special section.]

It takes a certain something to be an engineer. It takes a certain something else to come up with an idea that becomes a thriving electronics company, one that's grown for nearly 40 years. Then it takes something to stay with the company you founded, continue to drive its growth and innovation AND give back to your community relentlessly.

And it takes some that borders on the incomprehensible for the co-founders of a single company to share all of that at once.

The two college-era friends have built one of the most successful electronics companies (and unique cultures) in the industry in the past of the 40 years by focusing on people as much as technology. It's a philosophy they appear to employ in their personal endeavors as well.

During the Carter Administration, the two men were working together with Bill Nowlin at the University of Texas at Austin Applied Research Laboratories and decided to start building products for the then-new spec, General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB), or IEEE standard 488. The trio's first product was for the PDP-11. The three went full-time with their new company in 1980 (Nowlin would later leave NI). It wasn't until the company's signature product came out in 1986 that NI really hit its stride and ended up revolutionizing design: LabVIEW, a graphical design interface. Its first target platform was the Apple Macintosh.